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55 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 5h \ parent \ on: $330M Bitcoin social engineering theft victim is elderly US citizen bitcoin
You're right, I was -- thanks!
I think so. But I'm somebody who generally wants the truth, under the (possibly delusional) idea that I have some agency in things. The less that becomes true, maybe the more sensible it will be to be in denial.
40 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 7h \ parent \ on: Knowing what you don't know mostly_harmless
It's easy to understand why people would want to avoid it. I tell myself that reality is there regardless, you might as well open your eyes to it. But given the nature of the delusion, how would I know if I was living by that maxim?
Wow, that's heartbreaking. I have had so many talks with my parents in an attempt to stave off something like this. It makes you realize how delicate it all is, and the limits of what you can and can't control.
Additional thought: interesting to me that, with $330m on the line, the laundering happens through Monero.
Some people insist that Monero is worthless (discussion here], but this is a pretty giant fucking revealed preference re: actual utility in a high-stakes situation, as far as I'm concerned.
Especially given that it moved XMR price by 50%. The dude really wanted those funds in Monero.
I wrote a longish reply and then decided to turn it into its own post. You're asking an important question and I want to know the answer.
What does "conflict of interest" even mean in a situation like this?
If such interests suggest technical concerns about the implications of a change, then those implications can be discussed on their merits. What additional use of peering into the hearts of actors in the space?
I wonder - are there incidents that we're NOT hearing about?
Assuredly.
Think how this goes as the ripples spread out -- you can maybe protect your immediate family, but what about your best friend? Or maybe your fantasy football friends? The friendly barista who makes your drink even before you walk in?
The game theory of how much can be extorted from a guy to keep his high school girlfriend from getting gang-raped and mutilated is gross, but it will become relevant in the living future if btc does what people on this site hope it will do.
Lopp's conflict of interest is not a technical matter. If said conflict resulted in salient technical objections, those could have been raised.
FWIW I would love to hear your broader recs. If @siggy47 runs you off [1] you're always welcome at ~mostly_harmless.
[1] I'd bet money he would be delighted for any book reviews or discussion, though.
Super cool, except of limited practical utility since every model assumes the astounding bull-case (rainbow charts, etc.) I wish you could mess around with more pessimistic scenarios (hard fork implosion / centralized takeover / quantum hack), would be genuinely useful to me then.
Dude knows his audience, I suppose.
In my experience, it's easy to have tight ideology and principles and moral purity until you have to make something actually work in the real world with other humans. Once that happens, all those crisp ideals get squashed into a grey muck, or else the people nobly hurtle into irrelevancy or the grave.
I don't think I'm overstating it to say that btc existing at this point, at all, is a miracle. We'll see how miraculous it remains.
People ideological on what Bitcoin should be. Yet, they'd rather not admit that reality does not match their ideology, so they mad. People mad. Some people thrive on being mad. It gives them a reason to be.
Yes. It's good to have these people around, sometimes they say useful stuff and their passion can be a powerful force. It's also useful to remember they're no different from any cultists -- they have a worldview, it constructs reality narrowly, they march forward in service of the cartoon they see in their minds, the end.
I don't normally recommend soft SF here -- it's not the subgenre that I think of when I think of btc and adjacent fiction
What does this mean?
What, again, is education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire.
I'm stealing this. Will read the article later.
I think in a domain of sufficient size, you see all things at once; or maybe: what started as a singular subculture becomes an entire teeming ecosystem. Wrt btc, the geeks are still geeking; the mops are everywhere, with their podcasts and personal brands and vanity startups; and the sociopaths are issuing debt and playing geopolitics.
People insist that we're early. Seems right. Others insist that everything has changed. Also seems right. It's a particle, it's a wave.
Thanks for showing your work, it gives me something to think about, esp since it intersects with a related issue in my current mental model, which is that xmr is worth what btc would be worth if the government really wanted to destroy it; and so $btc - $xmr is its non-privacy premium.
The logic is something like:
- xmr is as un-traceable as they claim it to be
- because of this, organized crime and others on the wrong side of dominant powers would prefer to use it
- ... except you still can't use crypto to buy stuff at scale, there is no circular economy, you have to turn it into fiat, and turning crypto into fiat at scale is still a centralized affair
- therefore they can't realistically use xmr to meet their practical needs
- therefore demand for xmr is relatively low, since it's impractical for the people who need it at scale and too hard for normies to obtain, plus most normies have no desire for it -- this feedback loop keeps xmr price low
- meanwhile, btc is as non-private as they say, and anonymizing strategies are impractical at scale for similar reasons as above (e.g., fungibility issues in mixed coins)
- therefore, tx and money movement related to non-sanctioned activities stays mostly in the domains where it has always been, and the amount leaking into btc is not threatening
- the govt is happy and need not declare war on btc, it is the best avail practical option given the current world
Your argument is interesting in that it inverts some of this logic: basically, you take the low price of xmr as a sign that it's not fit for purpose, whereas I take it as a sign that it is, but that extra-technical issues get in the way. Now I'll need to think of how I might adjudicate between the two hypotheses.